Deeble House

The Deeble house in Lucas is the thing that makes you realize there's something in the water there.

Sam Dinsmoor lived just a few blocks away, sculpting his Garden of Eden around a post rock cabin, and apparently Florence Deeble drew inspiration from him.

It didn't take right away, she was a kiddo when he was doing his thing, but she was 50 when she started her own 'rock garden.'

The inside of her house has been taken over by Mri-Pilar, a found-object sculptor with a big thing for Barbie. And, apparently, for silver foil.

There are creative people, then there are people like Mri-Pilar.

I don't know if Florence conceived this as a tourist destination the way Dinsmoor did, but it's certainly become one. There's an obvious synergy that has taken place in Lucas, an economy built on weird.

I've actually had trouble processing all the pictures I took on this trip. Breaking them down by specific destination helps, but I haven't even told you about the toilet downtown.

I recall from seeing this house on Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations that at least part of the idea was to create picture postcards for each of Florence's vacations.

What I missed or didn't remember was that each postcard was made partially of rocks from each destination.

So I guess that means there's some real South Dakota granite in her Mount Rushmore, that sort of thing.

A neighbor of mine once expressed concern over the appearance of my own house, partly for some stuff I really did need to address but partly for our own modest expressions of what would generally be described as folk art. The neighbor in question mentioned a certain house in the East Bottoms, one I've made several photographic expeditions to, and I said, "Isn't that place cool?"

She said that no, it wasn't, or if it was it was cool in the East Bottoms but not in her neighborhood. The idea that someone living near her aspired to such creativity was alarming to her.

I doubt my home will ever be a tourist attraction, but I do love decorating my garden with stuff I've found while riding my bicycle. And with retired model rockets from my once active fleet (I keep thinking it's high time I get back into building and flying those suckers, they're lots of fun, but like furthering my career as a jazz guitarist, writing the great American novel and other windmills I've tilted at in my life, I don't know when I'd do it—I know, maybe in the time I spend blogging about folk art and shit).

I do wonder, though, how much grief Florence took from neighbors while she was creating this magnum opus in Quikrete.

NIMBYism is supposedly to be an acronym for 'not in my back yard' but I suspect people really mean not in any back yard they can see.